Publications

Books

 

Extractivisms, Existences and Extinctions: Monoculture Plantations and Amazon Deforestation (Routledge), 2021.

This book explores the existential redistributions that extractivist frontiers create, going beyond existing studies by bringing into the English-language discussion much of the wisdom from Latin American rural and forest communities’ understandings of extractivist phenomena, and the destruction and changes in lives and lived environments they create.

The author explores the many different types of extractivism, ranging from agroextractivist monocultures to mineral extraction, and analyzes the differences between them. The existential transformations of Brazil’s Amazon and Cerrado regions, previously inhabited by Indigenous people but now being deforested by colonizers who expand soybean plantations, are analyzed in detail. The author also compares extractivisms with the local and broader existential changes through global production networks and their shifts, produced by monoculture plantation-based extractivist operations. Anchored in the author’s own ethnographic data and comparison of lessons across multiple extractivist frontiers, the chapters integrate the many accounts of violence, and onto-epistemic and moral changes in extractivist enclaves, looking at these with the help of political ontology. The book offers details on how to characterize and compare different types and degrees of extractivisms and anti-extractivisms.

This transdisciplinary book provides new organizing concepts and theoretical frameworks for starting to analyze the unfolding natural resource politics of the post-coronavirus era, the advancing climate emergency, and the ever more chaotic multi-polar world. It will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of international development, global value chains, political economy, Latin American Studies, political ecology, and international trade, as well as anyone engaged with the practical and political issues related to globalization. ISBN 9780367610302.

“With Extractivisms, Existences and Extinctions, Markus Kröger has given us a searing critique of capitalist extractivism and its destruction of human and other webs of life. Arguing that we must embrace ‘more than human’ ways of seeing today’s crisis, Kröger makes a signal contribution to ongoing struggles for planetary justice.” – Jason W. Moore, Binghamton University, USA. Author of Capitalism in the Web of Life

“In this carefully researched and passionately argued book, Markus Kröger connects diverging strands of scholarship to delineate the contours of an ‘existential political economy’; a mode of analysis fit to capture extractivism’s essence as a machine that redistributes existences in such a way that the only things left are commodities… and extinctions. A must read!” –  Mario Blaser, Memorial University, Canada

“Markus Kröger offers a daring and sensible work, marked by epistemic ruptures inspired by Latin American Political Ontology and extensive fieldwork that spans several years and many journeys to the Brazilian Amazon. Utilizing consistent data in tandem with novel theorizing, this book analyzes the plurality of extractivisms while unpacking Cartesian labels to unravel the variety of existences being destroyed in our time. His personal testimony is masterfully combined with interviewees’ statements; together vividly voicing the ways in which existences are extinguished by different modes of extractivism.” – Andréa Zhouri, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil

“A beautifully-written examination of rare depth that offers insight into the many layers of life within what are typically labeled simply ‘resources.’ Markus Kröger forces readers to see how plantation-style extraction threatens the existence of subsistence, spirits, memories and a range of possible futures.” – Wendy Wolford, Vice Provost for International Affairs, and Robert A. and Ruth E. Polson Professor of Global Development at Cornell University, USA

 

Studying Complex Interactions and Outcomes Through Qualitative Comparative Analysis: 
A Practical Guide to Comparative Case Studies and Ethnographic Data Analysis (Routledge) 2021. 

Studying Complex Interactions and Outcomes Through Qualitative Comparative Analysis: A Practical Guide to Comparative Case Studies and Ethnographic Data Analysis offers practical, methodological, and theoretically robust guidelines to systematically study the causalities, dynamics, and outcomes of complex social interactions in multiple source data sets. It demonstrates how to convert data from multi-sited ethnography of investment politics, mobilizations, and citizen struggles into a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). In this book, Markus Kröger focuses on how data collected primarily via multi-sited political ethnography, supplemented by other materials, and verified by multiple forms of triangulation, can be systematically analyzed through QCA. The results of this QCA offer insight on how to study the political and economic outcomes in natural resource conflicts, across different contexts and political systems. This book applies the method in practice using examples from the author’s own research. With a focus on social movement studies, it shows how QCA can be used to analyze a multiple data source database, that includes results from multiple case studies.This book is a practical guide for researchers and students in both social movement studies and other disciplines that produce ethnographic data from multiple sources on how to analyze complex databases through the QCA. ISBN: 9780367557805

“This innovative book provides concrete procedures to bridge deep, case-based knowledge and QCA, thereby also combining the strengths of ethnographic research and systematic cross-case comparison. A must read for case-oriented researchers feeling the urge to ‘go comparative’… and for comparativists feeling the urge to ‘go back to cases’.” – Benoît Rihoux, University of Louvain (Belgium) and COMPASSS international network (compasss.org)

“Through his detailed description of a research process, Markus Kröger impressively shows how to apply QCA in the field of political ethnography. The book should also be read by researchers who want to take advantage of QCA as a tool for comparative studies including a small number of cases.” – Lasse Cronqvist, Senior Lecturer, University of Trier

“Markus Kröger convincingly demonstrates a key feature of QCA—that it is much more than a data analytic technique. It is inherently multi-method, as it incorporates case-level knowledge into the analysis of cross-case patterns, and vice versa. Kröger offers a practical, step-by-step guide to　the interplay of methods integral to QCA, which researchers new to the approach and seasoned QCA users alike can learn from.” – Charles Ragin, Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine

Iron Will – Global Extractivism and Mining Resistance in Brazil and India (University of Michigan Press) 2020, Open Access. 

The book lays bare the role of extractivist policies and efforts to resist these policies through a deep ethnographic exploration of globally important iron ore mining in Brazil and India. It also addresses resistance strategies to extractivism and tracks their success, or lack thereof, through a comparison of peaceful and armed resource conflicts, explaining how different means of resistance arise. Using the distinctly different contexts and political systems of Brazil and India highlights the importance of local context for resistance. ISBN: 9780472132126  

“This timely and important book offers nuanced analysis of the rise of global extractivism and how resistance to it reshapes state and corporate grand projects. Eclectic in its theoretical influences, Iron Will spans a wide terrain of scientific fields: political economy, political ecology, and political sociology, and must be read by academics and activists alike, especially those who are keen on agrarian, environmental, climate, and labor justice issues.”- Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Professor of Agrarian Studies, International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), The Netherlands

“Iron Will is doubly unusual. In the midst of doomsday environmental news, it shines a light on the victories won by villagers and activists against mining. In a field strewn with single case studies, it boldly surveys resistance to iron ore extraction across India and Brazil. For its intellectual courage and its political hope, this book deserves to be read widely.”- Amita Baviskar, Ashoka University, India

“This is a significant contribution to the literature on grassroots challenges to the international mining industry. Kröger demonstrates that grassroots political groups are increasingly capable of resisting destructive mining projects by cutting off and regulating access to resources at the point of mineral extraction.”- Al Gedicks, author of Resource Rebels: Native Challenges to Mining and Oil

Contentious Agency and Natural Resource Politics (Routledge) 2013, Open Access. 

The looming depletion of non-renewable resources has increased the global land grab in the past decade. So far however, the question of how and when people can influence economic outcomes has received little attention in the study of social movements.Based on in-depth ethnographic field research since 2003 in the industrial forestry expansion frontiers in Brazil and elsewhere in the global South, this book presents a novel theory to explain how the interaction between resistance, companies and the state determines investment outcomes. The promotion of contentious agency by organizing and politicizing, campaigning, protesting, networking and engaging in state and corporate-remediated politics whilst maintaining autonomy is central to explaining how impacted people influence resource flows, and block or slow projects they deem harmful to their livelihoods and the environment.  ISBN: 9781135021306 

Articles and other publications

2021

Agroforestry transitions: The good, the bad and the ugly

Ollinaho, O.  & Kröger, M.  2021, In : Journal of Rural Studies. 82, p. 210-221  12p.

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Scientific › peer-review

2020

For the full list of publications please see the Tuhat database of the University of Helsinki.